One of the biggest traffic drivers to my site is the ever confounding blackberry on a mac situation. People search for many things like “why does pocketmac suck,” “please help my poor, stupid blackberry” and “why is eli so awesome with blackberries” only to get brought to this site. Well, the last one is a given, or it would be if it was true. Although - I am currently the number one hit for “Eli came across” on Google Venezuela.
The point is, using a blackberry on a mac is harder than it should be. Given iSync’s extensive support for the 10 billion nokia, ericcson, and other wirelessly connected turds, you think they could at least provide USB driver support for RIM’s popular creations. RIM has enjoyed the number one position for market share in the U.S. for YEARS. Or at least it did before a little thing called the iPhone came along. But let’s not muse about conspiracy theories here. The point is, Apple dropped the ball in one of the easiest opportunities to appeal to business types looking to switch computer platforms. And Apple Inc. doesn’t share all the blame. RIM itself decided that rather than waste the time and energy required to support their customers out of the box, they’d just “endorse” the first 3rd party software manufacturer that came along. And lucky for PocketMac, because one of the shittiest pieces of critically flawed software ever made (if you can call it software) became the de facto solution for Mac blackberry users over night. I cannot overstate how painful, inconsistent, and completely ugly it was to deal with Pocketmac. If you got it to sync with your phone ONCE while it was installed on your computer you were lucky.
PC users not only enjoy a native client for syncing their handheld contend via USB cable, they also get bluetooth data sync. You know, just get close to an authorized computer and the data automagically backs itself up. Why the iPhone doesn’t do bluetooth sync is even more of a mystery to me, but I would assume it has something to do with transferring all those large video and mp3 files, where as all RIM has to worry about is some text files. Windows people can also use the phone’s data plan without having to hack apart modem scripts and guess about unprotected usernames.
A little while ago Mark/Space, a company that really -gets- synchronization released “Missing Sync for Blackberry.” With it came a reliable USB driver for charging, and decent iLife integration (iCal, Address Book, iPhoto, etc). The problem for me is that it came too late. Because I couldn’t get OTA (over the air) sync like everyone else, I started hacking together my own solutions, and believe my when I say they were awkward. I subscribe to my Google Calendar using iCal, which unfortunately was only one way, and a slew of other homebrew configurations. Even when the blackberry talks to the computer, I have to manually carry out 3 or 4 more steps to get things where I want them. It got so annoying that I stopped syncing. Period. Luckily, the Blackberry is a pretty stable creature that doesn’t experience data loss or crashes very often, because I took my time and energy as more important than my data security.
Then, in the middle of the night, Google started announcing and releasing API’s to their popular applications. Then they started releasing standalone Blackberry applications for OTA syncing (GASP!). At this point, with 3 vital Blackberry integrations (Maps, Calendar and Gmail), Google is the single greatest Blackberry software provider in the market. And they did it as a side project.
So now, when I add a calendar event via or computer or on my handheld, it uploads itself to the server and distributes the information to all interested parties. It’s beautiful. The chink in the chainmail was that you still couldn’t access your contacts because the shared address book used in gmail, calendar, etc did not have an API. Yet. Yesterday, Google announced the availability of the contact API, and the world (blogosphere) rejoiced. It is only a matter of time before the platform ceases to be an issue for Blackberry users. Assuming you don’t mind sticking your business merger agenda and escort phone numbers in the cloud.
For a while now, people have been talking about how Google already has a social network. No, not Orkut, that weird Brazilian site. It’s the address book most easily accessed from Gmail. It already knows who is family, friend, and foe (spam filter). It knows how you talk to most regularly (closest friends), and who you relegate to the drafts folder. It also knows what common interests you share (contextual advertising), and what you like to read (Google Reader share feature). Until now, it was neglected and unwieldy. Updating phone numbers in a purely text based communication medium seemed silly. But, if Google is able to connect the phone world with the online world via my address book and call history, and provide some useful metrics there, I think they will have gained a very powerful weapon against the likes of Facebook. Most of those services, linkedin, facebook, etc offer the ability to scan your gmail address book for common friends via Plaxo’s API’s, but why resort to that when all your info is compiled nicely in a dossier sitting at home.
So where’s my blackberry app, google? Let’s get on this!
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